Tuesday, 22 April 2008

...the book is submitted, and already in production. We're already designing the front cover, which is always fun. Before I go onto (or back to) other things, here's some interesting factoids about digital images:

There are more than 14 million digital images uploaded to Facebook every day [source]

The phrase "picture element" has been used to describe the individual points in a bitmap since 1927, and this wasnt shortened to pixel until 1965, using the popular abbreviation "pix" used by hollywood gossip columnists [source]

Images could be sent over telegraph in 1843 - only three or four years after the discovery of "photography" itself. There is a hidden history of electronic, and digital images, which stretches back as far as the invention of the film camera. But you'll have to buy the book to read up on that one.

Wednesday, 9 April 2008

... I finished a draft of the book! all 103,616 words of it. Then promptly went up to Scotland for a few days r+r. Good to see some snow and some real scenery.

Now I'm knee deep in formatting, before I send it to the publishers at the end of the month. It seems that for the bibliography, when citing online references, they want the date of original publication online, the date last updated, and the date I accessed it. *sigh*. The formatting guidelines are a few years old, from back when the web was spangly and new-ish and proper academics didnt really quote from online resources.

I have over 500 online references to check.... back down the salt (silicon?) mines, one last time....

About Melissa Terras

I'm the Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. I teach Digitisation, and my research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the humanities that would otherwise be impossible. My UCL webpage contains more information about publications and research projects. I also hang out at @melissaterras. This was my personal blog, and everything I said here was in a personal capacity - you can find my new blog over at melissaterras.org. I'm preserving this content to prevent bit rot, but its all replicated over the road, too - hope to see you there.